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Once Again, Ruling Class Stirs a Revolt

PARIS — Every so often, Britons in large numbers seem to rally around a common theme, a newly coined orthodoxy that brooks no dissent and rudely demands change. And, as events over the years — indeed the centuries — have shown, their leaders ignore such junctions in the nation’s history at their peril.

It happened, perhaps mawkishly, when Princess Diana died in 1997 and the royal family — perceived as stuffy and unresponsive, remote and unfeeling — seemed to disdain its subjects’ communal grief. Only when Queen Elizabeth II addressed the nation, descending from her palace to street level to bow — however discreetly — at Diana’s funeral cortege, was the monarchy redeemed.

It happened again in 2003 when over a million people took to the streets of London to tell the then-prime minister, Tony Blair, that they did not want their soldiers to fight in the American-led invasion of Iraq. But Mr. Blair did send his troops to war and became embroiled in the acrimonious debates over Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction that undermined his every justification for doing so.

It is often argued that the beginnings of his ouster in 2007 were rooted in those passionate days in 2003 when he lost the people’s trust at one of those moments when the British stiff upper lip turns into a mastiff’s snarl.

And it is happening again, in 2009. With shared fury, Britons have rounded on those who represent them at the Mother of Parliaments, scenting something rotten in this cradle of democracy as their legislators are caught out in tawdry manipulation of their expense accounts.

The instances of straight cheating and more ambiguous rule-bending are now legend. The public purse, it seems, financed the cost of cleaning a moat, of purchasing a home for pet ducks, of paying off non-existent mortgages, of buying manure, crackers and dog food. Legislators have been caught using public funds to sponsor relatives’ accommodation, renovate homes, hire unauthorized spin doctors and evade taxes.

By the standards of chief executives’ or investment bankers’ bonuses, the amounts were generally modest. Members of Parliament earn £64,766 a year, or about $104,000, and are permitted expenses including office costs and an extra £24,000 for running a second home — either to be near their constituents or to be near their colleagues on the green benches of Westminster. And, true enough, not all legislators have been found morally deficient.

But day after day for over three weeks, The Daily Telegraph has mined a trove of legislators’ expense accounts, stoking its readers’ revulsion at an aloof ruling class depicted as milking the public purse. (In 1997, it was the tabloid press that heaped pressure on the royals to change their ways.)

Usually, The Daily Telegraph is seen as speaking to, and for, the Conservative right of British politics, but the stain of its campaign has spread beyond its traditional targets.

Legislators from both main parties have been forced to quit, some in the face of angry public encounters with constituents whose sense of betrayal is personal. Still more will not be permitted to run for office again. The Parliament speaker, Labor’s Michael Martin, announced tersely and testily that he would resign in June. As if to escape a British equivalent of the French revolutionary tumbrel, politicians of all stripes are vying with one another to promise a new beginning.

“It’s been a terrible few weeks for politics,” David Cameron, the leader of the opposition Conservatives, said with rare understatement. People have come to believe “that the state is their enemy, not their ally.”

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Some of those passions and perceptions have been magnified by the prospect of elections across the Continent next week to the European Parliament — a ballot most Britons generally greet with indifference.

“Fewer people voted to decide who should represent them in the glass house in Brussels than did to choose who should stay in the Big Brother house on television,” said Timothy Garton Ash, a historian and columnist.

But the European ballot has been used in the past by some Britons as a vehicle of protest. For the British establishment, the fear now is that, out of disaffection and spite, the voters will give an undeserved and embarrassing electoral boost to the anti-immigrant British National Party, punishing the mainstream by rewarding the extremes.

Such are the worries that the Church of England, often remote from politics, became embroiled in a somewhat undignified exchange with Nick Griffin, the National Party’s leader.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, used a joint statement to tilt against political parties exploiting Britain’s malaise to conjure “fear and division within communities, especially between people of different faiths or racial background.” In response, Mr. Griffin told the clerics it was time they “grew up.”

In Britain, the European ballot is no more than a bellwether. The fight for the real prize is at the British national elections within 12 months. Before the scandal over expenses erupted, the Conservatives seemed confident front-runners. Now the question is whether Prime Minister Gordon Brown will risk an earlier vote — and whether the political system will endure as it has in the past.

Some close watchers of politics have their suspicions that the British elite will survive the shocks of 2009 — emerging as a phoenix in newer plumage, but the same creature at heart.

Britons may well hear promises of renewal from their leaders, Mr. Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian. But then, the promise of change will give way to “the long slow disappointment as the new masters behave like the old, exploiting all the powers and privileges of an over-mighty executive in an over-centralized state.”

Others have reached far into history to seek a parallel, settling on the bloody example of the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. At that time, rebellious serfs marched on London to challenge the feudal authority of an elite around the young King Richard II. Buildings burned. Heads rolled. And the rulers broke promises made to defuse the revolt.

“What irks voters, taxpayers and shareholders is what angered medieval peasants — that the ruling class regards us with contempt,” the columnist Carl Mortished wrote in The Times of London. “Meanwhile we must fight their wars, fill their castles with food and pay the taxes they impose.”